[BMOPSB] Day 2: Let's keep this train a rollin'
Disclaimer: This is part of the daily update series on my site (jasperflour.com) called BMOPSB (Building My Own Productized Service Business) where I document my journey into (you guessed it) building my own productized service business.
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Another solid day in the books.
Here's what I did today:
Project management board setup:
On Day 1, I did what I do with most projects: visualize my idea. This led to a great initial logo design, a solid landing page setup, and an eh’ crack at the sales copy 🤷♂️
Old me would’ve continued heading in this direction until everything was set-up and ready to launch. New me is a bit different.
A recent mantra of mine has been ‘plan for five minutes before doing anything new.‘ Simple… but effective.
In my heart of hearts, I wanted to dive right into my sales copy.
But I knew that it was time to go back and do some plan-oriented work. Luckily, I do this often for my clients and have a pretty ok system down.
This starts with a basic Kanban setup in my project management tool. My go-to software for this is Airtable.
This was divided into three categories: website, marketing, and operations.
In each category, a card can be placed into one of four sections: in queue, up next, in progress, or complete.
Over time, this has been a super easy and efficient system for getting ideas on the table and systematically organizing them.
As I dive deeper into this project, my table is bound to get waaaay more cards in it. Meaning, I’ll probably have to do some better categorizing to prevent ultimate chaos.
For now, though… it’s looking pretty clean 👌
Operations brainstorm:
One of the first cards I tossed into my Airtable was ‘Nail down product offering’, so why not chip away at it a bit?
After some thinking and research, I came up with a solid list.
Here, I’ve categorized the product into three phases: set-up, management, and promotion.
Whether it’ll shift away from this in the future is uncertain, but at least I now have a good understanding of how ContestKoi will generally be structured.
With this in my back pocket, I can begin to imagine the sales copy and hiring approach a bit better, too.
Marketing brainstorm:
This was also written in my initial Airtable setup. I love me some marketing, so here we go 🤓
My main focus for this card was to consider how I want to launch this. In essence, the question was: soft-launch or hard pre-launch?
After some reading, some contemplating, and some chatting with leadist io founder, Alex Gray, I’ve decided that going with a pre-launch is a smart move.
More specifically, in my pre-launch, I’ll promote the ContestKoi landing page with a ‘Join the Waitlist’ CTA.
To really show that we believe in what we’re doing, anyone who joins the ContestKoi waitlist will instantly be entered to win two free months of service (offer not set in stone yet). On launch day, we’ll select and announce a winner.
Aside from this, Alex reminded me that it’s best advised to niche down as much as I can. Not only will this be beneficial for marketing purposes, but it’ll also make organizing the product offering easier.
Thanks again, Alex. Awesome advice 😉
Email account setup
After thinking on the marketing a bit, I did some research on waitlist management softwares (WaitListed & Prefinery stood out as early contenders).
Before signing up for anything though, I realized something: I don’t have an email address for ContestKoi yet.
Not a problem. I logged into SiteGround, hopped in my cPanel, added my new email, and set it to forward to my personal email.
With that out of the way, time to keep moving, right? Actually, it was getting late by then & time to pack things up.
Not to worry, still very strong for Day 2.
I approve 👍
Financial breakdown
No money came in or left my wallet today. Surprisingly enough, this means we’re at the same numbers here.
Total Spent: $71.19
Total Earned: $0
Question of the day
Didn’t get any answers to Day 1’s QOTD 😭
No big deal, I’ll keep pushing.
Today’s question: What’s your favorite project management tool?
See you tomorrow,
